Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is the story of a dynastic struggle that provides a social, moral, and cosmological background to the climactic battle. The present English rendition is a retelling based on a translation of the Sanskrit original published by Pratap Chandra Roy, in the beginning of the last century. William Buck has condensed the story. The old translation on the basis which he worked, covers 58800 pages of print, while his own book is less than a tenth of that length. But by and large, Buck’s rendition reflects the sequence of events in the Sanskrit epic, and he uses the traditional techniques for instance, of stories within stories, flashbacks, moral lessons laid in the mouths of the principal characters. There are other English versions of the Mahabharata, some shorter, some longer. But apart from William Buck’s rendition, none has been able to capture the blend of religion and martial spirit that pervades the original epic. It succeeds eminently in illustrating how seemingly grand and magnificent human endeavours turn out to be astoundingly insignificant in the perspective of eternity.